University of Huddersfield Repository Rosenthal, Gabriele The Narrated Life Story: On the Interrelation Between Experience, Memory and Narration Original Citation Rosenthal, Gabriele (2006) The Narrated Life Story: On the Interrelation Between Experience, Memory and Narration. In: Narrative, Memory & Knowledge: Representations, Aesthetics, Contexts. University of Huddersfield, Huddersfield, pp. 1-16. This version is available at http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/id/eprint/4894/ The University Repository is a digital collection of the research output of the University, available on Open Access. Copyright and Moral Rights for the items on this site are retained by the individual author and/or other copyright owners. 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For more information, including our policy and submission procedure, please contact the Repository Team at: [email protected]. http://eprints.hud.ac.uk/ 1 The Narrated Life Story: On the Interrelation Between Experience, Memory and Narration GABRIELE ROSENTHAL Summary Interested in the experience of people as well as in their present reconstructions of their experiences in the past, we as biographical researchers have to deal with the distinction between the narrated personal life as related in conversation or written in the present time and the lived-through life. When reconstructing a past (the life history) presented in the present of a life narrative (the life story) it must be considered that the presentation of past events is constituted by the present of narrating. The present of the biographer determines his or her perspective on the past and produces a specific past at times. In the course of a life with its biographical turning points new remembered pasts arise at each point. This construction of the past out of the present is not, however, to be understood as a construction independent from the respective experienced past. Instead, memory-based narratives of experienced events are also constituted through experiences in the past. So narratives of experienced events refer both to the current life and to the past experience. In my paper I will present a gestalt-theoretical phenomenological concept of the dialectical interrelation between experience, memory and narration. Using an empirical example, namely the biography of an ethnic German from the former Soviet Union, I will discuss this distinction between the life history and the life story as one that must be taken into account in all narrated and written biographies. Introduction As a biographical researcher and sociologist, I am not only interested in the present day constructions, but I also try to reconstruct the process of the genesis of these constructions. The underlying assumption is that in order to 1 2 Narrative, Memory and Knowledge _____________________________________________________________________ understand and explain1 social phenomena we have to reconstruct their genesis – the process of their creation, reproduction, and transformation. Although still believing in the reality outside of the text, ie. the reality the text is referring to, I am not so naïve to take the narration as an incorrect image of the experience. Stories of self-experiences could be more or less based on a process of recollection, but memory is not a fixed and deficient storage. Edmund Husserl rejected the idea that something is stored up in memory and remembered incorrectly depending on the situation of recollection. Memory, as Husserl has set out before, is rather based on a process of reproduction where the past is subject to a constant modification according to the present of the situation of recollection and the anticipated future: … memory flows continuously, since the life of consciousness flows continuously and does not merely piece itself together link by link into a chain. Rather, everything new reacts in the old; the forward-directed intention belonging to the old is fulfilled and determined in this way, and that gives a definite coloring to the reproduction. (Husserl, 1990: 56) Just as the past is constituted out of the present and the anticipated future, so the present arises out of the past and the future. This interrelation between past, present and future has also been emphasized in a decided manner by George Herbert Mead in “The Philosophy of the Present” (1932). Mead illustrates the determinate character of the past that is irrevocable as well as revocable: … the past which is expressed in irrevocability, though there has never been present in experience a past which has not changed with the passing generations. The pasts that we are involved in are both irrevocable and revocable. (Mead, 1932: 36) Above all, Husserl makes clear that the temporality of our perception is different from the temporality of our memory. The phenomenon of the difference between the order of experience and the order of recollection, and therefore also the structure of the narrative of remembered situations, deserves special reflection in the field of biographical research (cf. Fischer 1982, 1985; Rosenthal, 1993, 1995). It is particularly important to consider that in the process of narrating one’s own experiences the parts of the narrative that are 1 ‘Understanding’ and ‘explaining’ are understood here in the sense used by Max Weber and Alfred Schütz. According to Weber’s postulate of subjective interpretation, scientific explanations of the social world must refer to the subjective meaning of the actions of human beings and thus explain their actions in their interdependency with the actions of others. According to Schütz (1962), sociological constructions have to be based on constructs of everyday life. On the Interrelation Between Experience, Memory and Narration 3 ______________________________________________________________________ made up by recollections can vary significantly. Not every narrative of a self- experienced event is based on a process of recollection while narrating. For example, a story that has long turned into an anecdote which I have already related many times and which I have modified with respect to the experiences of interaction, can simply be retold without being based on a recollection process in any way. Likewise, in the present of the narrative I can fit together different experiences, my own ones or others that were handed down to me, to form a story about a situation. By contrast, if we engage in an off-the-cuff narrative, and if we permit ourselves to enter into a flow of narration, we increasingly find ourselves in a stream of memories; impressions, images, sensual and physical feelings and components of the remembered situation come up, some of which do not fit in our present situation and which we have not thought about for a long time. The narration’s proximity to the past thus increases in the course of the narration, and perspectives entirely different from the present perspective show themselves, which becomes clear in the argumentation parts or also in the narrated anecdotes. We use the phenomenon of the increasing closeness to the experienced past due to the process of narrating and recollection with the technique of the biographical narrative interview as it was introduced by Fritz Schütze (1976). With this technique we encourage the interviewees to extend their narrative sequences and try to support them during the process of narrating and recollecting (cf. Rosenthal, 1995, 2003; Wengraf, 2001; Hollway and Jefferson, 1997). However, even in the case of a spontaneous memory-based narrative of experienced events we have to assume that there is a difference in general between the experienced event in the past, the recollection thereof and the narrative. The translation of a recollection into the linguistic form of a narrative already gives rise to a significant difference. When analysing the interviews, particular attention has to be paid to the differences between experience, memory and narration. This means that as biographical researchers we have to deal with the distinction between the narrated personal life as related in conversation or written in the present time – the life story – and the lived-through life – the life history. In order to come to terms with this distinction between the life history and the life story, and in order to develop some tools for the reconstruction of life stories, I use concepts from the gestalt-theoretical phenomenological approach (Rosenthal, 1995, 2005), as it was presented by Aron Gurwitsch (1964). The combination of gestalt-theoretical concepts and the phenomenological approach helps to deal with all aspects of the dialectical interrelation between experience, memory and narration. In order to draw methodical consequences from these considerations, which I will briefly address in the following, I have developed a method of 4 Narrative, Memory and Knowledge _____________________________________________________________________ analysis in which the distinction between life story and life history plays a central role. In biographical case reconstructions sequential analysis represents a procedure where the temporal structures